The Best and the Brightest

Just under two months ago, a friend recommended a book that I had seen when it was first published. I have just completed it. The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam is about the Vietnam War, and about how many of the most important American civilian officials and military officers made it turn out the way it did. The book is centered primarily on the time frame from early 1961 though 1968, but there is sufficient coverage of prior decades, of the involvements of prior administrations, of the French post-war colonial experience, and of the broader story of the civil war in China to give it very broad perspective. The Best and the Brightest is a relic of an extinct life form: journalism. Today, there is neither the supply nor the demand to sustain real journalism. A reader may detect a few signs of some of Halberstam's biases, but they are well controlled. They do not make the book, or detract from it. What Halberstam has done is to develop a few dozen well-documented biographies of the principals and to weave them into a tapestry that gives us a coherent history of the whole Vietnam debacle. Those who were around at the time will remember when the newly-elected President John Kennedy put together an Administration of highly educated, very intellectual persons, many of whom had at least some arguably relevant experience from their careers during WWII. Halberstam covers that in great detail, Those who were around at the time will probably also recall how just about every other speech made by JFK from the fifties on contained some reference to the threat of world communism. And some, if not many, will remember how Kennedy had become enamored with the idea of waging limited "brushfire" wars to combat communist aggression wherever it may rear its ugly head. Halberstam aggresses that latter point well. We may compartmentalize our memories and think of Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis as subjects separate from Vietnam. Halberstam corrects us on that--to the US Administration, it was all part of a global chess game. Of course, most of what we read and hear today about JFK paints a picture of some kind of idealistic, fictional, and mythical Hollywood royalty described as "Camelot". And then there was Johnson, who inherited US participation in the conflict in Southeast Asia and who surely made it much worse in every possible way. Reading the words of the principal actors today reveals some surprises. Some whom I had thought of as "doves" were anything but. The book is much more than an ccount of gross misunderstandings, bad strategy, failures of comprehension, and so on. To me, there are two really shocking things that come out. First, quite a number of highly qualified professional people who were sent to Vietnam to evaluate the situation first-hand became persona non grata when their honest evaluations for the facts as they saw them differed from the Administration party line. The careers were ruined, as others lied and many others died. The other is the abject dishonesty exhibited by more than a few of the top players. Generals falsified reports. LBJ told different people different and conflicting things on the same day, kept communications compartmentalized, and bullied everyone he could, including his own Vice President. And it is convincingly revealed that the Exalted High Priest of the Numbers Men, upon whose analyses the entire war strategy had been based, thought nothing of making up numbers from whole cloth during meetings as he went along, for the sole purpose of discrediting others. A handful of people are seen in good light. Most of the bad ones ultimately got their comeuppance, albeit at the great expense of so many others.

If you were drafted and had to serve under LBJ and wondered how naive Americans were in the 60's, you may want to read this book. What a Croc of Stuff--people with years of experience and knowledge of Vietnam were purged from group of advisors if they did not know how to "go along to get along." This book is half biographies of about a dozen men and half historical matter; makes generals look dumb and proven liars (yes, we had them back then too). Group think of Military men helped to kill over 58,000 Americans. Unless you believed in Colonization (Saigon leaders spoke French and had been educated by French), or believed in "saving face," or bit on the crap about "dominoes," this War was not for you. A great investigative book about a pathetic War. Purely Pathetic Time in America. It was a page turner in that I learned so much about personalities and who stood for what and who had backbone and who did not. The book was NOT a page turner because it was exciting. Time is suppose to heal but Vietnam is a running sore for me. What is additionally sad is that we did not learn much from our involvement--30 years later we saw Powell lie and "Vice" have boys killed looking for WMD which did not exist. Et Cetera! Truly thankful that this book was written. Thanks, David--you RIP

I finally got around to reading this classic work, and I was both enthalled and disappointed. Enthralled by the energy, prescience, and prescription with what's wrong with American foreign policy, a preview of our never ending mistakes of hubris and conviction that as a country we still are the best and the brightest and know what is best for the world. The parallel with Iraq and Afghanistan today is eerie. Poor Obama, making the same mistakes, coddling the conservatives and the Establishment, oh well. On the other hand, the books suffers from rambling, free association, and repetiveness. It really needed a better editor and better organization. It flips back and forth from its own past and present with confusing effect. It's portraits have a taint of predisposed bias, a desire to pigeonhole its characters in one dimensional anti-Communist baitin, true enough perhaps, but also suspect. As a liberal, I suppose, I have always resented our country's penchant for wanting to fix whatever is wrong with the world, but the author's obvious bias against that preconception often gets in the way of the objective reporting he so proudly proclaims. Also, as a study in power run amok, I think Caro's Johnson trilogy (and of course his bio of that New York meglogmaniac, Moses) is far superior in thematic relevance and cogent analysis, to say nothing about the power of literary non fiction and plain powerful language and description. I think Halberstrom never made up his analytical mind about war and policy(read The Coldest Winter.) Still in all, as a vivid document of our country's too many mistakes, it will stick with you. Read it for valuable lessons about our past and still more valuable lessons for the future. Kennedy wasn't so great, after all, and Johnson was only half bad, and so typically American. On the other hand, how bad can anyone be compared to Acheson, Dulles (both of them) Rostow, Bundy, and the rest. I always had wanted to attend Yale and Harvard, but now I think I was better off just going to Brandeis, putting up with John Roche's Vietnam hawkish views and retaining my independent bent of mind. We have translated our anti-Communist fanatic atitutes for our anti-Terrorist paranoia. A fair trade, I suppose, if you are of a frame of mind that we live in a world of enemies, but this book is a good object lesson that after all we're just not that smart. A final word. Halberstrom's work is seminal, readable, and bright. Hey, that's the best or close to the best, for all its disorganization.

Like other reviewers I had this on my bookshelf for 20 years or more. Even 40 to 50 years after the fact the American involvement in Vietnam is very hard to understand and accept. I have to say that this book totally lives up to its billing. Despite its length there is tremendous pace and drama throughout. It was very hard to put it down. Mr. Halberstam is a great writer and historian. Halberstam profiles the leading military and political figures in rich detail. Each person; Johnson, McNamara, Bundy, Taylor, Westmoreland and so many others are truly three dimensional. He overlaps with the events of the day on the war front and at home to really give the reader a fuller experience than most history books. It is so fresh, alive and virile even today. Considering he published this in 1970 or 1971 without the benefit of more perspective I think it is amazing how spot on he was in his reporting, observations and conclusions. I would give this six stars if I could - both an important history lesson and one of the most engrossing books that I have ever read. Incidentally I read this just after "No Ordinary Time" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. You can't escape that sad reality of how we blew our position in the world in such a short period of time. The arc of American history from 1940 to 1970 is one of ascendency to superpower from humble, inward roots. In only 30 years we squandered a great deal and our position on the planet with arrogance, poor decisions, stubbornness, a lack of vision and weak leadership. Sadly 1990 to 2010 seems to be an echo of that prior period reflecting our inability to learn anything and dooming us to repeating our mistakes. I really hope this continues to be read widely. Maybe it will inspire the the best of the next generation to politics or to write a great book!

I read this book when it was first published and then found it to be an excellent description of the failures of the Kennedy-Johnson administration as it incrementally entered a war with North Vietnam. I have read it again after I read of Mr. Halberstam's death a few weeks ago. I had been very bothered by the actions of the US in Iraq. After reading The Best and Brightest I know what was bothering me. It is a repeat although with different characters, different enemies, different locale but the same thinking process and lack of thought for the many "what ifs" that war produces. It would have been nice if a few of the planners of the Iraq fiasco could have read Halberstam's book and taken note of the mistakes that were made in 1963 before launching the war in Iraq in 2003. Halberstam quotes Henry Kissenger as saying something to the effect of "we won't make the same mistakes . . . we'll make our own mistakes." It looks like the current planners and executors of Iraq strategy are making the same ones that were made in 1963 - and learning the same lessons about a counterinsurgency war being fought with traditional troops, equipment and strategy. The Iraqi insurgency in Iraq will go the same way as the insurgency in Vietnam - they will wait us out but without the large scale battles that took place in Vietnam once the army of North Vietnam entered the action in large numbers. Vietnam was disaster and tragedy for the Vietnamese as well as the Americans. What seems to be preventing the same level of disaster in the US is the fact that this war is being fought by non-draftees. That is one dissimilarity with Vietnam which has prevented the large scale protests across the nation which were seen as the presidency of Lyndon Johnson unraveled. I recommend this book to all students of political and military strategy. It is an exceptional read and I would predict you won't come away angry - just saddened that so much talent brought forth so little in the way of return for Vietnam and the United States.

Mr. Halberstam's genius was showing how internal domestic political pressures inform foreign policy, including such huge decisions as going to war. Would JFK felt the need to make a stand against the communists in that "little Indochina backwater" where the French had failed to hold onto their colony, had Truman and the Democrats not been savaged as having "lost China" to the communists, or attacked as "weak on communism" during the Red Scare throughout the '50s by right wing red baiters like McCarthy and others? Or if the Korean War had not been seen widely as a failure? Would he have had better and likely far more skeptical expertise available to him had so many China experts who were victims of that paranoid period not been run out of government? Or if he felt that the Soviets respected him personally more, post-Bay of Pigs or Cuban Missile Crisis? Halberstam paints a portrait of JFK as a president not quite in command of his own Vietnam policy, going along with the most brilliant and well educated minds of his generation, career climbers and technocrats all, who were eager to show the world that the US could fight a war against the communists and do it on their own terms. High tech, efficient, awesome. Vietnam may have been at root an unsolveable political problem (at least for the Americans) but to the leaders of the war it was a military, operational and technical problem - it had to be, as it was the only tool they had at their disposal. LBJ inherited JFK's commitment to Vietnam, and a GOP congress which was hostile to his Great Society policies, LBJ's crown in the jewel. He essentially gave in to the war, started bombing North Vietnam and ultimately putting in troops, with the idea that he could assuage right wing anti-communist Republicans and obtain their acquiescence on his domestic policies. He too, thought he could control the war. Much of the book is made up of mini-biographies of the great minds who populated both presidents' cabinets, famous and infamous, and their drives, points of view, ambition. It is a Greek tragedy of hubris, groupthink, bureaucracy, believing what one wants to believe, rejecting realities that get in the way, internecine rivalries, ambition, stubbornness. Halberstam was among the most brilliant historians of fairly recent US history, and this book is extremely important.

I was actually really looking forward to reading "The Best and the Brightest," but only a few pages into it I became annoyed and frustrated with Halberstam's verbose, ponderous, pretentious writing. Halfway into the book, I felt like I was mired in my own Vietnam War, devoting tremendous time and resources to winning it, and the more invested I became the more trapped I became in this pointless endeavor. "The Best and the Brightest" is ostensibly about how shining intellectuals -- primarily McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk -- of the Kennedy White House trapped America in Vietnam. And while there was some biographical detail of the three, I didn't feel that there was enough nuanced understanding (ironically, the richest psychological profile was of Lyndon B. Johnson, who was definitely not one of "the best and the brightest") of any of these three. In fact, I came away from the book with the keen sense that these "intellectuals" were just arrogant and shallow, self-serving and power-hungry individuals. The major point of the book comes from the Pentagon Papers -- that the American government is a self-serving bureaucracy only interested in the entrenchment and expansion of its own power, and that each President, no matter what his political affiliation or ideology, eventually subscribes to this bureaucratic mindset as his primary religion. This is something that was true of Johnson, and something that's still true of Obama. There really was no reason why "The Best and the Brightest" had to be 665 pages long (in fact, even the self-righteous introduction felt too long). The best book on the Vietnam War remains "Fire in the Lake."

The first (and only) time I read David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” was shortly after its publication in 1975… that is, until last week, when I finished reading it again. I was just as impressed with it this time as I was forty years ago. David Halberstam (1934-2007) was a journalist and author who reported from Vietnam for the New York Times in the early 1960s. He was one of a group of journalists (including Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett, among others) who earned the ire of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for his reporting of what he viewed as the truth about Vietnam – that America was getting itself involved in a conflict it couldn’t win. Halberstam’s reporting from Vietnam earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. As Halberstam explains in his preface to “The Best and the Brightest,” he spent three years researching and writing the book. He intended his title to be ironic, not literal. The “Best and the Brightest” were leaders who were considered America’s elite – John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge and William Bundy, George Kennan, George Ball, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, John McCone, and others. They were mostly graduates from Ivy League schools, many with Ph.D.’s; men of keen intellect and supposed prodigious management and leadership skills. Men who prided themselves on straight talk. And yet, these men slowly and steadily entangled the United States in a war on the Asian mainland that they knew, from both the warnings they received and from bitter experience, they had little chance of winning. And once they got America entangled in Vietnam, they mismanaged the war and deceived the American people about it, and left the nation torn asunder by divisions that exist to this day. I don’t necessarily agree with all Halberstam’s judgments and conclusions in “The Best and the Brightest,” but I do think he made a powerful argument that seems to be largely vindicated in the four decades since the end of the Vietnam War. I believe “The Best and the Brightest” is simply the best book ever written about America’s involvement in Vietnam. If you only read one book about this subject, this is the book to read. Most highly recommended.

Un detalladisimo ensayo de como los hombres mas brillantes y mejores pudieron llevar a Estados Unidos a perder una guerra. Muy recomendable.

This is a fascinating glimpse into the making of foreign policy in the US during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, with a sharp focus on Vietnam. The spectre of ex-Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red-baiting is alive and well, even though the man himself is discredited and out of power. No one, not Kennedy, Johnson or their underlings, can afford to NOT see Vietnam through the prism of Communism/anti-Communism. This is what eventually leads to the US's defeat in Vietnam.

A book which casts a light over a pivotal period for USA and the whole world as we know it now. There is so much to understand and learn in the book through the description of the people, the decisions taken and the events that determined the USA policy over the sixties. This book is a milestone not only for each American citizen willing to understand what really happened in those years but also for everyone one else who whishes to comprehend how cold war policies and Vietnam war escalation have affected directly and indirectly the global community of nations. Halberstam style is straight and clear.

As I write this review, the Taliban have entered Kabul with little apparent resistance. 20 years after going in after 9/11, all guns and modern technology blazing, the modern armies the the west (principally the USA) are staring ignominious defeat in the face, once again to a 3rd World rag-tag force. Eerily, the situation in Afghanistan looks like the fall of Saigon all over again. This book describes brilliantly how a group of exceptionally talented individuals at the highest level of the US government got Vietnam so terribly wrong. Intelligence, however, is not everything. As these individuals took power after Kennedy’s election in 1960, they looked an impressive bunch. However, as one seasoned political hack observed, he would have felt much happier if they had “ever actually run something”. Intelligence brings baggage with it, namely arrogance and hubris. LBJ decided, after JFKs death, to keep the ‘best and the brightest’ in place. This would prove a pivotal decision. This book analyses the fundamental mistakes made as the Vietnam conflict escalated. The Democrats, wounded by the apparent charge that they had ‘lost China’ a decade before, were terrified that they would forever be seen as weak in the face of communism. This fear helped shape their future decisions. Their strategy was based on a number of flawed assumptions. Firstly, that a 3rd world army was no match for a modern one, that AirPower was decisive, the South Vietnamese government would get better and win local support, and that in the short term Ho Chi Minh would be forced to negotiate. Lets consider each in turn. The Generals were trained and had experience of fighting conventional European style wars. The Vietcong could just melt away, strike at will and then disappear. Hanoi could also reinforce battalions with ease and send them down the Ho Chi Minh trail. The US, thousands of miles from home, had Congress and the public to deal with. Also, Ho Chi Minh was fighting for an idea- they were in it to change their country. The southern government was corrupt, repressive and unpopular, with coups a normal occurrence. No wonder the natives flocked to Ho Chi Minh. The ‘best’ also had a condescending view of the Vietnamese- surely these people, simple as they are, will see what we are doing for them? However, this book explains that the conflict owes at least as much to Nationalism as it did to Communism. The French Indo-China war had done for the colonial power, enhancing the growing sense of Vietnamese nationhood, which was further developed by subsequent US involvement. The fact that the French, a decent army, was beaten should have sounded alarm bells for the US, but again this apparent contempt for all this not American seems incredible in retrospect. AirPower alone, was never enough to force Hanoi, fighting in their own backyard and knowledgable of the terrain, able to replenish losses at will, to the negotiating table. It was a fantasy. The author describes Vietnam as a ‘tar-baby’ the more you struggle the more you get stuck. Finally, the US simply underestimated Ho Chi Minh as an adversary. Also, the book describes how the ‘reports’ that reached the desks of the Pentagon were always hopelessness optimistic - a lesson to all about the dangers of subordinates telling you what you want to hear rather than the truth. The best and the brightest is a seminal work that everyone who aspires to office should read. What’s clear is how few people appear to have done so. One haunting section has proven to be eerily prescient as the Talibon, today, enter Kabul with little apparent resistance. In the mid 60’s Robert McNamara was asked by a question by a subordinate. What, he asked, was to stop the Vietcong just waiting for the day when inevitably we would have to go home? Would they not just take over? McNamara paused, and replied that he had not thought of that. And so in 2021, over 40 years since the fall of Saigon, we see the exact same playing out again in Kabul. The Best and the Brightest is an important lesson for all of those who believe to much in themselves.

A successful effort to explain how and why Vietnam happened. It's a must read for anyone seeking to go into, or facilitate anyone going into public life.